1st Practice Exchange on Intercultural Capacity-building

Our first Regional Practice Exchange brought together professionals from artistic and cultural organisations from across the Nordic Region. It was hosted by the Nordic Forum for Interculture and held at Spiritus Mundi. Guided by the goals we set out in the Rainbow Paper’s chapter on intercultural capacity-building in organisations, we looked in depth at:

• ways of diversifying the recruitment to governance positions in cultural institutions (based on the example of the project Styrende Mangfold from Norway),
• cultural institutions broadening the constituencies they work with and include in their workforce (based on the example of the Copenhagen City Museum),
• theatres rethinking their audience relations to include the before and after of peoples’ theatre experience (based on the example of the Taastrup Theatre in Copenhagen),
• opening established cultural spaces to a greater variety of cultural groups (based on the example of Union Scene in Drammen, Norway).

The participating professionals (who already constituted an informal network) made important new discoveries through their practice exchange and identified needs for action in several domains. In particular, they thought it useful to collect and compare existing rules and regulations concerning diversity policies, which have to be taken into account under the funding regimes of their various countries, regions and cities. The aim is to formulate a European-wide recommendation that all publically funded cultural organisations should reflect in staff and governance bodies the composition of the population they serve and that they all elaborate a diversity action plan which covers all aspects of their operations (programming, audience relations etc).

Read the report of the Malmö Practice Exchange